Vreal is opening up access so any creator can download the app and start recording visits to worlds like Tilt Brush.

Vreal’s recorder maps player movements onto an animal avatar while also capturing the entire changing virtual environment. With something like Tilt Brush, that means for the first time folks can actually record an entire experience from start to finish and then revisit it all later.

Apps like Altspace helped pioneer a similar type of capture, while Mindshow uses a similar premise to enable sharing of performances that build up over time. Adding Vreal to creativity apps like Blocks and Tilt Brush, though, gives creators who are already using those apps the opportunity to share the entire creation process with others.

To be clear, Vreal is not like OBS or mixed reality video capture. Vreal records the entire virtual environment in a linear way with voices and body movements mapped onto avatars. It’s a VR replay you can revisit later alone, with friends or with anyone.

Vreal CEO Todd Hooper said he is hoping to work with a number of top tier apps (Beat Saber is on the list of apps they’d like to support) to find out what people want to capture or stream. The service is still pretty bare bones at the moment, but a tool like Vreal holds the potential for creators to use a variety of virtual environments as the jumping off point for other types of content. Tilt Brush tutorials, for example, might be much easier to grasp if you are looking over the shoulder of the artist as they make their artwork.

Here’s a sample capture from Vreal minus audio that shows the basic idea:

Check out Vreal now on Steam with titles supported including Tilt Brush, Blocks and Gorn.

One note, though, is that a “known issue” listed with the latest update warns that “during Early Access, we can’t guarantee that recordings you make now will be available in the long term, due to the need to regularly update the platform with new features and titles. We’ll let everyone know in advance (likely through a post here on our Steam community hub) when older recordings will need to be unpublished from the app.”

More bad news for ZeniMax Media in the ongoing legal dispute with Facebook’s Oculus.

The company, which owns Fallout and Elder Scrolls developer Bethesda, had its request for Oculus to pay $40 million in attorney fees thrown out on Monday, Law360 reports. Texas federal judge Ed Kinkeade issued the sanction, noting it was in response to ZeniMax’s failure to provide relevant documents that company CEO and Chairman Robert Altman indicated he knew of during two court orders.

According to the report, the documents pertained to ZeniMax’s value and Altman’s stake in the company. Upon a third court order, ZeniMax produced 72 documents that it had not provided before without, according to Kinkeade, any explanation for their absence in previous orders. Oculus still contends that there may be yet more documents unprovided, though the judge also denied the company’s request for a partial retrial.

“What is unmistakably clear to the court is that the plaintiffs, not their attorneys, engaged in continued and repeated efforts to resist production of responsive documents in willful violation of at least the court’s first and second orders,” the judge wrote.

Oculus was ordered to pay ZeniMax $500 million in damages last year after the latter claimed Oculus COO John Carmack had stolen technology when moving from the Bethesda-owned id Software over to the VR specialist. Back in June 2018, however, Oculus was able to halve that payout to $250 million, while ZeniMax’s efforts to have sales of the Oculus Rift were rejected. A judge called for the end of the dispute over a year ago now but it shows no signs of slowing down; Facebook still intends to appeal the remaining $250 million payout, so you can be sure there are still more developments to come on the case.

If you’re in the UK, you know this weekend is the last bank holiday for a while. That means it’s the last chance to plan a lengthy three-day break and then look back at it all next Tuesday and realize you wasted everything unsuccessfully trying to speedrun Superhot VR. That is unless you head to this weekend’s Insomnia 63 event, where there’s a bunch of new PSVR games making their UK debut.

Beat Saber, the incredibly popular rhythm action game from Beat Games, is going to be playable at the Birmingham-based show this weekend, for example. As far as we know, this is the first chance people in Europe have had to go hands-on with the console version of the game, which is pretty funny seeing as I just got back from Gamescom and pretty much all Sony was showing on headsets there was Firewall and Astro Bot (which are both at Insomnia too). There’s some snaps of the stand below.

As you can see Sony is also showing flashy puzzling tribute Tetris Effect at the show and Sony London’s anticipated shooter, Blood & Truth is there too. It’s a good chance to try out Firewall before it launches next week, at least.

Beat Saber PSVR was announced back at E3 earlier this year, though we don’t know when it’s launching yet. In the game, you wield two lightsaber-like swords, slashing colored notes that arrive in time with a beat. We love it, you love it, and PSVR owners are almost certainly going to love it too. Beat Games is promising a perfect port of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive game complete with PS4 Pro support and even exclusive features.

Google is already taking classrooms around the world on virtual field trips, but now it’s bringing students into VR laboratories too.

The company today detailed its partnership with Labster to bring more than 30 virtual labs to students across the globe via the Daydream platform, which it announced at I/O earlier this year. In a blog post, Google reasoned that many students and schools (especially those studying online) don’t have the resources to spend lots of time in laboratories, which is required in many STEM degrees such as biology. These virtual labs, then, allow anyone to spend as much time as they see fit carrying out experiments.

The labs are fully interactive virtual environments, providing access to state of the art equipment. They’ll allow you to examine organisms under a microscope, sequence DNA, and combine materials in a way that’s reminiscent of a classic point-and-click adventure game. They can also augment your experience with features not possible in real life, like visiting new planets and manipulating DNA at a molecular level.

While the Labster package is mainly being sold to universities, a free sample app is now available for Daydream owners. It’s a pretty thorough package, though we’d love to see additions like multi-user support in the future.

Arizona State University’s online Biological Sciences course already started offering these virtual labs earlier this month, and it’s soon to arrive in courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Texas at San Antonio, and McMaster University, with more sites across the US and Europe coming soon. The labs are compatible with both the Daydream View and the recently-launched Lenovo Mirage Solo.

At the Irvine Spectrum shopping center in Orange County, California, anyone can use virtual reality to step inside worlds and fight Skynet or escape Jurassic World.

The attractions represent the culmination of work by half a dozen companies and one of the best chances yet to prove there’s a market for out-of-home virtual reality entertainment in the United States. Indeed, VR’s journey toward the opening this summer of top tier attractions in Southern California began six years ago in an office not too far from the Irvine Spectrum. That’s when Brendan Iribe, Palmer Luckey and the other co-founders of Oculus entered their first office and started building the Rift.

Spaces Inc. uses the Rift connected to an HP Omen PC backpack to provide a wireless walk-around VR experience complete with face scanning, full-body tracking and a trip through time battling Skynet. Tickets are $30 per person and up to four people can play together at their location right across from Barnes & Noble and Dave & Buster’s.

Spaces is a startup co-founded by Shiraz Akmal and Brad Herman, former Dreamworks veterans who ran a division called DreamLab focused on new kinds of immersive experiences. Their debut ticket price is a few dollars less than similar experiences from The VOID, which operates a location featuring Star Wars at Downtown Disney in nearby Anaheim. Yet another Orange County shopping center recently saw the opening of a VR attraction for Aliens charging $22 per person. The price being asked for all these is quite a bit more than the $5 Dave & Buster’s is charging for a five-minute trip to Jurassic World in a motion simulator with an HTC Vive. If Spaces represent the high end of VR attractions, then, this startup is doing some things best-in-class. Here’s a look at what a trip to Spaces is like.

Leaving With A Video Of Your Trip

The experience begins when Spaces hands the guest a QR-coded card to track their high scores and face.

Yes, Spaces scanned my face.

Getting your face scanned at Spaces helps personalize your avatar in VR so that others can know who is who.

Face scanning is a quick process that requires looking left and right.

The actual time spent inside VR in the Terminator experience should be about twice as long as Jurassic World — a little more than 10 minutes. Terminator also offers far more interactivity, including full-body tracking and movement as well as physical props you need to use to complete your mission. Spaces also sends everyone home with a 15 second clip of their experience.

For an extra $10 a team can go home with a 2-minute version of the video. Below is an example of the two-minute video as cut automatically by their system during my playthrough this week.

The capture of my face looks weird and funny and the video misses some of the most memorable moments of playing through the experience. For example, you can see a shot in the video above where we pick up a battery pack and take it to

I’m a simple man. I love beautiful, cel-shaded worlds, RPGs, and fighting monsters online with friends. Similar in many ways to Sword Art Online, Nostos is all of those and more, in virtual reality, and I’m absolutely foaming at the mouth to see more of this game.

We would really love a true, in-universe VR MMO that follows the plot of the first season of the popular SAO anime, but the prospect of that ever really happening is pretty slim. The only VR game to speak of the series has so far is more of a dating experience and it’s just…not what we want.

So far, all communication we’ve received from NetEase and their PR indicates that despite what it looks like, Nostos is actually not an MMORPG at all, but simply an open-world VR RPG with online elements. For now, your best bet for a VR MMO is still Orbus VR and its forthcoming relaunch.

As you can see in the trailer above, Nostos is absolutely gorgeous. The art style is reminiscent of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and recent Tales Of games, which is quite the compliment. NetEase is a China-based company, but everything I’m seeing has a distinctly JRPG flair. As I sit here writing this in my Zelda t-shirt, listening to Kingdom Hearts music, looking at my Final Fantasy art book, I can say with complete confidence that I am this game’s target audience based on what I’ve seen so far.

Details are scarce right now, but according to a press release today, NetEase are leveraging Improbable’s SpatialOS simulation technology, the same platform in use for social VR MMO, MetaWorld. In the trailer we can see players climb the environment, chop down trees, build houses, and fight monsters in a pseudo-survival focused open world. Seasons and time of day shifts also seem to play a big role.

While at Gamescom UploadVR’s Editor-in-Chief, Tal Blevins, got to try a brief demo and didn’t get enough time to write a full hands-on report, but did give me some details.

First of all, his demo only featured four total players, but it was a large sandbox as you see in the trailer and images. Even though it looks inspired by a lot of classical JRPGs and anime, the developers are still unclear on if they will include a formal “quest” system or leave it entirely open-ended for player-focused emergent storytelling.

There will be a mixture of modern and fantasy weapons, such as bows and guns, and the art style he says reminded him of Final Fantasy XI Online. He also took note of a clever weapon-holstering system in which you can store weapons along your belt to carry around, which sounds similar to how Stand Out: VR Battle Royale handles storing guns. In his demo they came across a truck similar to the one in the trailer that they were able to get inside of and drive around — he even ran over some other players while doing so.

A dedicated group of Trekkies look to immortalize the shows infamous vessel via an interactive virtual tour. Kirk or Picard? It’s a question that’s haunted Stark Trek fans for years, destroying countless friendships in the process. Regardless of where your allegiance may lie, there’s no denying the absolute triumph of television that was Stark Trek: